Still from Fred Hatt's video for "Ka=Fire Mi=Water"
This week in New York there are two performances I’m associated with and recommend.
On Sunday, October 18, at 8:30 pm, Monkey Town, Brooklyn’s immersive video cube bar/restaurant presents a program of Music and Butoh (Japanese avant-garde dance). My elemental video imagery is part of the performance Ka = Fire Mi = Water, by dancer Mariko Endo with live music by Gregory Reynolds. “Kami” is a Japanese word for God. Its syllables are the words for fire and water. It suggests a conception of spirit as a circulation of rising and falling energies, and that’s about as good a description of what this piece is about that I can offer.
Also running from tonight through the 18th, Seeing Place Theater‘s production of Keith Bunin’s play The Credeaux Canvas is presented at the Bridge Theater at Shetler Studios. This is an intense little story with complex, nuanced characters, and its depiction of young New York bohemians is rich and real. The lead actress is Anna Marie Sell, whose portrait by me graced the cover of American Artist Drawing Magazine last Spring. Anna Marie models for an artist in the play. The director of this production is the multitalented Lillian Wright, also an actress and a great model I’ve worked with many times. Lillian was the model for my light painting photograph below, which was used for the postcard and program for this show:
Lightpainting for "The Credeaux Canvas", 2008, photo by Fred Hatt
To keep up with my performances, exhibits and events, check the “Calendar” page on this blog.
Before going into the subject of this post, I will mention that this Saturday I will be exhibiting artwork and performing at “Summer Magic”, the fifth-anniversary fundraiser event for CRS, an important supporter of butoh dance, movement theater and healing arts in New York. Info here.
Cross Pollination 02, August 2009, by Fred Hatt
Choreographer Valerie Green‘s lovely Green Space Studio in Long Island City (Queens, New York) overlooks the Manhattan skyline and the 59th Street Bridge. Once a month Valerie hosts “Cross Pollination“, an open improvisational session in the studio where dancers, musicians and visual artists can practice their crafts while taking inspiration from each other. For me it’s an opportunity to draw some dance and do some movement myself. Many of the participants alternate between playing instruments and dancing or between dancing and drawing or painting. Here are some of my recent sketches from these events.
Cross Pollination 02, June 2009, by Fred Hatt
Cross Pollination 03, August 2009, by Fred Hatt
Cross Pollination 03, June 2009, by Fred Hatt
Cross Pollination 04, August 2009, by Fred Hatt
Often the movement of the dancers at Cross Pollination is way too fast for me to draw the figures by observation. I either construct the figures imaginatively from fragments observed or caught in memory, as above, or simply use the energy and fleeting impressions of figurative elements to construct abstract compositions like those below. In these I’ve turned the paper to different orientations while working, so if you look at them from different angles you may be able to pick out recognizable body parts.
Cross Pollination 01, June 2009, by Fred Hatt
Cross Pollination 01, August 2009, by Fred Hatt
I know at least one other artist that often attends these sessions has posted her Cross Pollination work on the web. Check out Irena Romendik‘s light-footed brushwork.
My drawings pictured in this post are either 18″ x 24″ (45.7 cm x 61 cm), ink on paper, or 50 cm x 70 cm (19.7″ x 27.5″), aquarelle crayon on paper.
In an essay I wrote in 1999 I said “Drawing records something photography does not – the movement of perception in time.” Every mark made in drawing represents a moment of seeing or of imagination. The energy of the artist’s strokes convey to a viewer something of the energy of the creative act. I want to preserve this quality of line, and for this reason have chosen to work primarily with media in which the line does not become blended or smudged.
Since the time I came to understand the time-based aspect of drawing, it has been an important basis of my creative process. I had first experienced drawing or painting as a record of the movement of consciousness in making abstract work, but I eventually discovered that my focus benefited greatly from working with models. In In order to practice working from models in motion, I organized “Movement Drawing” sessions, life drawing sessions in which the models were dancers and other kinds of trained movers.
Movement Drawing Flyer, 1997, by Fred Hatt
In order to make it possible to see and capture something of the movement, we asked the models to perform extremely slow movement, stop-and-go movement, and repeated movement (same gesture or movement phrase repeated for five minutes at a time). These sessions were challenging and exhausting practice. It was possible to fill an entire fat sketchbook in a single session. I was spending a lot on paper, and the piles of drawings in my apartment were growing quickly. One of my solutions was to draw many overlapping figures on the same page, using different colored crayons selected randomly so that the individual figures could be distinguished in the mesh. Here’s a typical example from that time:
Patrick movement sketch, 2000, by Fred Hatt
Another adaptation was drawing with ink on long scrolls, as seen in this previous post.
Around the time I was most intensely involved in movement drawing, I visited my family in Oklahoma, where I grew up. Looking through the artwork I had done as a child, the earliest sketch I found was a crayon drawing made when I was three years old or so. My mother had labeled this drawing as I had described it to her, “José Greco Dancing in Purple Boots”. José Greco was a famous flamenco dancer and choreographer who made a great impression on me as a child. Here’s a clip of Greco’s dance, followed by my childhood interpretation:
José Greco Dancing in Purple Boots, 1961, by Fred Hatt
Finding this drawing showed me that I had known my mission from the start. Already at age three I was inspired by dance, trying to capture the energy of movement through scribbly crayon drawings. I just lost my way in life and it took me nearly forty years to find my way back to the path!
Starting around 2003 I began using the technique of overlapping figures in different colors to make much larger, almost mural scale drawings, and developed a way of working in which I allowed a sort of chaotic buildup of figurative lines, followed by a phase of finding dynamic form in the mess. An earlier blog post describes the process and shows phases of development of one piece. A number of large drawings made in this way can be seen in this gallery on my portfolio site.
The remainder of images in this post are of several of these large drawings made in the past year. All are 48″ x 60″ (122 cm x 152 cm), aquarelle crayon (sometimes combined with oil pastel) on black paper. These are selected not necessarily as the best of my drawings of this type, but to show variations on the style. Each one is made working with a single model who takes multiple quick poses, mainly of their own choosing. Work with the model is completed in a single session, followed by further work on my own to develop and clarify the compositions.
The model for this one is a dancer of great intensity:
Tropic, 2009, by Fred Hatt
On this one I kept changing the orientation of the paper as I added new figures. It makes it a little difficult to read. I imagine it being displayed on a ceiling, or with a slowly rotating motor so different figures might dominate the composition at different times:
Edges, 2009, by Fred Hatt
In the next drawing, the overlapping figures become a kind of complex landscape, a mysterious cave:
Range, 2009, by Fred Hatt
On the drawing below, when I was finished working with the model I was afraid the mass of figures was a hopeless jumble, but bringing color into the in-between spaces caused the whole thing to crystalize beautifully:
Seer, 2009, by Fred Hatt
In these drawings, not only do the lines express the movement of my perceptions in time, but the multiple overlapping figures show the movement of the model over a period of time. Aspects of the bodily form, the quality of movement, the energy and feeling expression of the model become part of the resulting image.
The cubists were trying to move beyond the limitations of the pictorial or photographic view by showing their subject from multiple angles simultaneously, suggesting the third spatial dimension not by the traditional way of projection or perspective, but by fragmentation. In these drawings, I’m fragmenting the fourth dimension, time, to bring it onto the plane and into the frame.
In 2007, I created this performance at CRS with butoh performer Corinna Brown. Corinna was previously seen here in the post Emergence. The music is a live improvisation by Dan Fabricatore on upright bass.
This is a shadowplay and a painting performance. The use of shadows on a translucent screen allows us to play with the relative scale of the performers.
In one of my artist’s statements, I said “The act of drawing, like dancing or making music, is a highly focused form of movement in time. The expressive power of drawing is all about rhythm and flow, feeling and modulation. So I have been drawn to try to capture the qualities of movement through drawing, and to explore drawing itself as a performance art.” I’ve been doing drawing/painting performances for many years. This is the first one to appear on this blog.
This week I’ll be leading workshops at the Sirius Rising festival at the Brushwood Folklore Center in Sherman, New York, so I won’t have the chance to do a new post until after July 19. See you then.
Pina Bausch, a choreographer who reconceived theatrical dance as a physical laboratory of passions, has passed from us unexpectedly at the age of 68, with her career still at full steam. I don’t have my own images or video of her, but offer this YouTube excerpt from Coffee with Pina, a film by Lee Yanor that finds something of the essence of Pina’s restless grace in her dancing hands.
